Fishbowling with Asparagus Farts

(May 25, 2002)

When Hub and I first moved to Massachusetts, we were poor. I mean poor. We somehow managed to rent a tiny one-bedroom basement apartment in Reading, in a squat brick building behind a convenience store and across from a McDonald's. I remember getting the building manager to give us discounted rent. No, I didn't flash my boobs, that only happens in the movies. No, there were a few clauses in the rental policy that I debunked. For example, the one-bedroom units were lower rent if only ONE person was living there. When I asked why, he admitted it was because TWO people have TWO cars. I pointed out that we only had ONE car. He quoted us lower rent if I personally promised to call him if we got a second car.

The place wasn't a dump by a long shot, I mean it was clean and everything worked, but it was depressing. The one window was a sliding door that let out onto a tiny concrete deck. The deck was sub-parking lot level -- we looked UP at car grills and tires, and though we could see all our neighbors coming and going, we knew them only up to crotch-level. The building's dumpster was also right outside the window, across from our "deck." So yeah, great view. Oh and you know that scene in the Blues Brothers movie, when Elwood brings Jake to his rooming house? "How often does the train go by?" The commuter train rattled past, right on the other side of the parking lot, so basically within throwing distance. Hub had made our "couch" from a plank of plywood and a smushed futon cushion, set on four cinder blocks. Think that's pathetic? It gets worse. That couch was also our only bed. Cheering us up perhaps more than it had any right to was a Nintendo game unit that we'd inherited from somewhere. Except that our TV was this tiny little AM/FM radio that also featured a four-inch screen, and to operate it, you switched over from "radio" to "TV" and then twirled a dial to change channels. It only got like three channels. Black and white! So, while didn't have an actual TV, we did have, for some reason, a full-size TV table. So we put the little dinky TV on the full-size TV table, which was very funny to us. Years later and it still makes me laugh when I think of this one time, coming home from work and opening the door to find Hub, perched at the edge of the "couch," leaning forward and earnestly playing The Legend of Zelda on Nintendo. His face scrunched in serious concentration, about five inches away from this eentsy little screen. Oh my god the ridiculousness of how that looked...the little Zelda characters were no bigger than my fingernail.

For income, Hub was temping (he hadn't entered grad school yet) and I was working at REI (I'd worked in the New York store and managed the clothing department there). In the New York store, I was making about $10 an hour. Guess what? Retail in Reading, Massachusetts is not retail in New York. I got $6.20 an hour in Reading. Yeah, I understand the finer points of cost-of-living adjustments, but because I'd had three roommates in New York and no car, having one roommate in Reading WITH a car meant I was paying out about the same amount of cash to live on. My own personal cost-of-living had not changed.

We needed money. You know what's a good part-time job for when you already have a job with a weird schedule? A paper route. Aside from the fact that you have to get up at 3am, and that it's every single day, NO DAYS OFF, it's a pretty good deal. You can make like an extra $600 a month, which at that time pretty much paid our Reading rent. We found out that there's this whole paper carrier sub-culture. In the dark of pre-dawn when the streets are empty and every footstep echoes in the silence, a whole contingent of pale, scruffy people in gray sweatsuits and fingerless gloves converge upon the newspaper distro centers. These are places you don't even know exist, because they're all shut down by the time most people are brushing their teeth. These paper carriers, like couples married for years, have begun to look like each other; they smell of Dunkin Donuts, old sneakers and cigarettes. Some of these people don't only deliver the Boston Globe, some of them deliver two, three different papers between the hours of 3 and 7 am, loading up their cars from idling trucks stacked with hundreds of literally hot-off-the-presses newspapers, and that's their sole income. This is not your idea of a paper route, some eleven year old tossing papers from his bike. This is like, serious paper delivery. Sometimes a carrier delivers whole stacks to apartment building lobbies, hotels, and businesses. All the convenience stores. Sometimes it's an actual newspaper box route, you know, the self-serve newspaper boxes you see every day but never think about how the papers get in there every morning? On a route like ours, a lot of it is actually bringing single papers to individual houses, and also smaller stacks of ten or fifteen to some kid's house, who'd then do what your usual image of a paperboy does, some eleven year old tossing papers from his bike. Except in this case, being driven around by exhausted, puffy moms in the family minivan.

We delivered the Boston Globe in Hub's Toyota, an earwax-colored economy car that I think was born the same year we were. That paper route killed that poor little car. Had we not worked it so hard, it would have lived, but every single day, starting, driving, stopping? It was too much. It developed an exhaust problem during the paper route months, which made the inside of the car thick with noxious exhaust fumes, which made us lightheaded. But so did starving and being evicted, so we kept doing the route.

The way we'd work was, Hub would drive and I would sit in the back seat prepping the papers, which towered in a stack beside me. I'd take each one, fold it in thirds and wrap a rubber band around it. In winter or heavy rain I'd also have to sheaf each one in a plastic bag. I'd count out the bigger stacks for the apartment buildings and the eleven year olds and their exhausted, puffy moms. I could usually prep a good number of them while Hub drove us to the route's beginning. Then we'd split the job of exiting the car and running up to the drop site.

I kinda liked the looks we would get each morning at the distro garage. The pale, scruffy gray people looked at us like we were interlopers, two young, fresh faced people, this long-haired dude and his paper bitch. Most of them were solo. "They think you're my paper bitch," Hub said. "They wish THEY had a paper bitch!" I said.

Aside from the pitiful little radio/TV combo, the cinder block couch/bed and the depressing sub-level apartment, another side effect of being poor was that the supplies in our kitchen were pretty much limited to pasta, pretzels, and peanut butter. As soon as we got a little bit of money from doing the paper route, we started buying better food. Hub and both like to eat a lot of vegetables, and I particularly seem to have an unfortunate penchant for the vegetables that are more expensive. Of course. Like, green bell peppers are okay (fifty cents each) but RED or YELLOW bell peppers light up my whole day (they can be up to two bucks each!).

One night in deepest winter, I went wild and bought asparagus. Already one of the more expensive vegetables, it was even out of season. I could have gotten about five pounds of carrots for what two small asparagus bunches cost. And you can't even eat the whole asparagus spear, because the base is too hard and stringy. So ounce for ounce, I had no damn business buying asparagus on our minuscule budget. But I LOVE asparagus, I saw it, and I splurged. That night I steamed it and served it up with some roast turkey.

Now, about farting. It's a well known fact that men fart more often than women. I did some research on farting (nothing I can show you, just trust me) and my research results say that women only fart about half as often as men do, and it's never as putrid nor as forceful.

Wanna know what levels the playing field? Asparagus and turkey. Both at the same time. Hub and I did that paper route for months and have few specific memories of it, but neither of us will ever forget a day we call Fishbowling with Asparagus and Turkey Farts. It's Massachusetts, so it was freezing cold in the wee hours of the morning after the asparagus and turkey dinner, and we were driving all over hell and gone delivering those Boston Globes. The whole time, I was farting like a football team at a chili cook-off. I farted so much that there was no oxygen left in the car. My gasses had replaced every molecule of breathable air, leaving only a stench so foul I cannot even put strong enough words together to explain. My farts were so thick and heavy that they just hung there like air biscuits, each one only having a chance to dissipate just the slightest bit before another one would let go with a voluminous whoosh. They were forceful, too. I wouldn't have been surprised to turn around to find actual visible clouds of some deep green cloud like in cartoons. I had never smelled such a smell coming out of me before. It was rancid. I have never had to experience what it was like to be around a decomposing body, but I feel like this came close.

I didn't expect sympathy. Which was good, because I didn't get it. "Evil!" Hub was yelling, trying to steer the car while simultaneously pulling his sweatshirt up over his nose and mouth. He was doing everything possible to avoid breathing it in, but it wasn't avoidable. "OH GOD, FOUL!"

It was relentless. I couldn't stand to be around myself, but there was nowhere I could go. It was also FREEZING out, we tried but it was too cold to even open the windows. To make matters worse, this was when the car was having exhaust problems, so we couldn't even turn on a fan.

"Ugh--GOD! What the---holy HELL!" Normally, Hub and I would be arguing about whose turn it was to exit the car to bring the papers up to the houses. On that frigid morning, we argued about who had to stay in the car fishbowling with my death stench.

Eventually the turkey/asparagus methane frappe I'd created in my digestive system worked itself out. Needless to say In the coming months and years, once we were solvent enough to afford plenty of vegetables on a regular basis, our digestive systems learned how to process asparagus. We also got a new car, one with exhaust fans that worked.

Even so, needless to say, we never again did combine asparagus with turkey on the same day.